6 Africans shot in attack driven by ‘racial hatred’
MILAN — An Italian gunman with extreme right-wing sympathies shot and wounded six African immigrants Saturday in a two-hour shooting spree, authorities said, terrorizing a small Italian city where a Nigerian man had been arrested days earlier in a teenager’s gruesome killing.
Police photos showed the shooting suspect with a neoNazi tattoo prominently on his forehead and an Italian flag tied around his neck as he was arrested in the central Italian city of Macerata. Authorities identified him as Luca Traini, a 28-year-old Italian with no previous record.
Traini had run for town council on the anti-immigrant Northern League’s list in a local election last year in Corridonia, the party confirmed, but its mayoral candidate lost the race. The news agency ANSA quoted friends of his as saying that Traini had previously been affiliated with Italian extremist parties such as the neo-fascist Forza Nuova and CasaPound.
The shooting spree came days after the slaying of 18year-old Pamela Mastropietro and amid a heated electoral campaign in Italy where antiforeigner sentiment has become a key theme. Italy has struggled with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refuges in the past few years coming across the Mediterranean Sea in smugglers’ boats.
After the attack, Premier Paolo Gentiloni warned in Rome that “the state will be particularly severe against whoever thinks of feeding the spiral of violence.”
In Macerata, Interior Minister Marco Minniti said the gunman had been motivated “by racial hatred,” and had “a background of right-wing extremism with clear references to fascism and Nazism.”
Authorities said the six wounded — five men and one woman — appeared to be random targets in various parts of the city of 43,000 in Italy’s central Marche region. Italian news reports indicated that the gunman’s trajectory included the area where the Italian murder victim was found and where the prime suspect in her slaying lived.
The identities of the shooting victims remained unknown. Hospital officials said late Saturday that one had been treated and released, while the others had either undergone surgery or were facing operations for their injuries. One of them remained in intensive care. Macerata Mayor Romano Carancini said all six victims were black Africans.
As the violent attack unfolded, police told residents to stay inside and ordered a halt to public transport to limit the casualties.